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Everyone is talking politics lately, and some brands are jumping in to the heated discussion. But is it smart to insert a political stance for your brand?

There are a number of considerations to take before a brand should make politically opinionated statements. First, know your audience. Chances are you have an audience/customer base that is diverse– from geography, gender, age to political stance, etc. So first, consider the business consequences of angering or alienating even a small group of customers. Is it worth it?

Also importantly, don’t be rash. Especially lately, many of us are passionate about our political opinions. But passion can lead to rash Tweets that can cause damage–even if deleted later. Is your brand or business the right place to voice your personal opinion? Think it through, talk with your peers, superiors and advisors before making any heated statements you may regret later.

Dont participate just to participate. All too often brands insert themselves into trending topics just for relevance. Customers can see right through this misguided approach. While it’s smart to participate in trending discussions when appropriate, participaton should be authentic to the brand’s voice and cause. Otherwise it can feel out of place, confusing or downright off-putting to your audience.

If you’ve weighed the consequences and feel there is a compelling reason that your brand should take a stance, do it with taste. Bashing, name-calling or ranting is disrespectful and will almost certainly divide your audience. Stay positive and supportive in your statements, and be authentic and consistent in your voice.

Lastly, understand that your brand is human and you can’t please everyone. The strongest brands are those that forge meaningful and honest relationships with their customers. People make companies and people have opinions. Your customers will respect you for honesty. So if your opinion is relevant and adds value, standing up for your beliefs through your brand can have long-term benefits for your customer relationships.

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The following post was written by guest blogger Ashley Christiano. Please read her bio after the post.

So you’ve decided to try your hand at influencer marketing, that wild west of user acquisition where you put your brand in the hands of a total stranger. A total stranger who’s probably never used your product or app or service, but one who’s following trusts their word before all else. They’re smart, they’re beautiful, and they have the audience you want.

Now what?

You’re excited. You’re a little scared. And you’re probably pretty unsure of what to do next.

I was in your shoes not too long ago. Just a marketing manager for a news app, thrilled at the getting to try out one of the year’s big trends. So I did what any good marketing manager does: research. I read articles, I took notes, and I vetted agencies and platforms. I decided a platform (Revfluence) would work best for us. With our small test budget and virtually zero knowledge of just what we were getting ourselves into, it would give us the most hands-on experience and control over the campaign.

So here’s what I learned over the course of our two-month experiment.

Be patient:

It will take much longer to get this campaign up than you think, especially if you’re working with YouTube influencers (which we were). Give yourself at least a month to just get a good number of creators signed on to work with you before making any decisions about the success or failure of the campaign.

Try out different kinds of creatives:

For this campaign, we were focused on YouTube only. So for us it was trying out different kinds of video reviews: dedicated app reviews, a mention in a best apps of the month for various platforms, life hacks or productivity tips.

For our campaign, the dedicated videos did not work at all. They cost more and they sounded less authentic, leading to less installs and lower engaged users.

So ask your influencers what ideas they have. What do they think will resonate best with their audience?

Give them bullets, not a script:

You’re working with them because they know their audience and what their audience wants. So give them some free reign and room for creative expression. We provided some bullets based on copy we knew worked for us in other marketing efforts, as well as an outline of the general benefits of our app. But beyond that, we let them go. And it was the ones who had the most fun with it, and sounded the most natural, that did the best.

Know your target audience, but be willing to experiment:

For us, we knew our current audience was predominantly male, urban professionals and early adopters. So we went for a younger, male audience (gadget and app reviewers, and men’s lifestyle, for the most part) but also explored other areas (a travel blogger, some film reviewers, and a young woman who’s channel is all about life hacks and being your best self).

By the end of our campaign we had determined who worked for us: Attractive millennials who have their shit together and a devoted following. From Austin who included a killer review of our app in his December Android Apps of the Month round-up, to Haley who pitched Reuters TV as a life hack and a way for young women to keep up with the news that was relevant to them.

Which brings me to my next point….

Provide a phonetic pronunciation:

There’s nothing worse then getting half a minute in to this so-far great video that probably took the influencers HOURS to produce, only to discover that..NOOOOOOOO…they pronounced your product’s name incorrectly. Yes, this happened to us. More than once. And then we started sending a phonetic pronunciation (it’s ROY-ters, y’all) to each influencer.

By the end of our campaign we had gained a better understanding of how to collaborate successfully with YouTube influencers. We’d learned what worked and what didn’t, and armed ourselves with the knowledge that this could be a viable acquisition method for us in the future. With the right creator and the right message, our Cost per Install was on par with our Facebook campaigns, and our engagement for these users was actually higher.

Does it take some extra leg work? Yes. But you’ll also learn a lot about what real consumers think about your product, and be able to use that knowledge in future campaigns, influencer marketing or not.

Plus, you’ll get to throw one of the year’s big buzzwords around in casual conversation for a bit. And who doesn’t like that?

-Post by guest blogger Ashley Christiano-

Ashley Christiano is the Senior Marketing Manager for Reuters TV, where she focuses on user acquisition and retention for the award-winning video news app. Ashley has worked in the mobile media space for over five years, starting out at Hearst Magazines before joining the team at Reuters TV.

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There haven’t been any posts on AspiringCMO in a while, but I promise there’s a good reason! I’ve been traveling since June 1st 2016 with my spouse, fulfilling a lifelong dream to see the world.

So far we’ve visited Portugal, Spain, France, England, Wales, Scotland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany and now we’re in Vietnam. We’re planning to travel for a few more months, returning to the US in February 2017. Still on our list: Thailand, Cambodia, Italy and Croatia.

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This year’s annual Facebook developer conference was full of exciting announcements pertaining to marketers. Here’s a rundown of the most important takeaways:

Messenger Platform: Facebook introduced new APIs that allow brands to create custom experiences on Messenger. These APIs allow brands to build their own Messenger bots, such as automated on-demand content like weather or traffic updates, or customized messages such as receipts and shipping notifications.This API is currently open to a select few partners, and will broaden to everyone at a later unspecified date. For more information, visit: https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-tips-messaging-for-page-admins and check out this video from F8.

Branded Content: Facebook updated their branded content policy to enable verified Pages to share branded content on Facebook. They also launched a new tool for brands/pages to “tag” a marketer when they publish branded content, allowing the marketer to see data from the tagged post and have the option to share and boost the post. For more information, visit: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/branded-content-update.

Rights Manager: Facebook launched a new tool to help media companies monitor and protect intellectual property on Facebook. Publishers can upload their full library of videos to Rights Manager, monitor them, and use rules to tell us about how each video can be used. Learn more: https://media.fb.com/2016/04/12/introducing-rights-manager/.

Facebook Analytics for Apps Improvements: Improvements to Facebook Analytics for Apps include deeper audience insights, push and in-app notifications (beta), powerful breakdowns, and an App Events Export API to analyze data offline.Most interesting for app marketers is the push and in-app notifications beta. You can now set up, create, send and measure push and in-app notification campaigns directly through Facebook. Request access to the beta by going to the Push Campaigns screen in Analytics for Apps.

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Whether a seasoned marketing pro or new to the game, one of the most important things you can do to improve paid marketing performance on Facebook is test audiences. Testing allows you to to find the best targeting to produce scalable, efficient results. But knowing what to test—and how to get started—is the tricky part.

First, a note on Facebook’s ad structure. A campaign establishes the high-level goal that you’re trying to achieve. You can target different audiences, also called “ad sets,” within a campaign. For example, if my goal is to get iPhone app installs in the US, I might name my campaign “iPhone – US – App Installs”. Within that campaign, I can define different audiences, or ad sets.

Now, the important question: how do you find the Facebook audience(s) that will produce the best results? The simple answer: test anything and everything, within reason. You may be surprised by which audiences perform well. Here are a few ideas for developing your test audiences:

Leverage your existing your users/customers

In my experience, the most efficient Facebook audiences are based on my current customers. These audiences, called “Lookalikes” can be created in a few ways:

If you have your users’ email addresses, you can upload those directly to Facebook as a Custom Audience.

If you have a Facebook pixel on your website, can create a list of web visitors.

If you have the Facebook SDK in your mobile app, you can create a list of app users.

Lookalike audiences are created in the Facebook Ads Manager. Select “Lookalike Audience” and choose your source and audience size. Audience size ranges from 1% to 10% of the total population of potential matches, with 1% being those who most closely match your source.

This seems like a no-brainer, but you should define your target audience and brainstorm the qualities they might share. How old are they? Where do they live? What do they like to do? What other brands/products are they interested in? Once you’ve done this, you have many options to find those individuals:

InterestsInterest targeting lets you define your ideal audience by their interests, hobbies and Pages they like on Facebook. Facebook identifies these interests from information users added to their Timeline, keywords associated with the Pages they like or apps they use, and ads they’ve clicked on.

BehaviorsBehaviors are activities that people do on or off Facebook, constructed from both someone’s activity on Facebook and offline activity provided by Facebook’s data partners.

Partner and Facebook categories:Facebook has created categories of 1st party data, grouping together people who have a similar affinity. Partner Categories include data from data partners. More here.

ConnectionsThis allows you to target (or exclude) your Facebook fans. You can also target friends of Facebook fans. Additionally, you can target people that have attended your Facebook events.

Delivery will be limited unless your audience is large enough. Each ad set should have an audience size of 1MM-5MM people. This doesn’t apply to Custom Audiences, because they are highly qualified, but does apply to Lookalikes.

Allocate a larger budget to a smaller number of ad sets to optimize more effectively, rather than splitting your budget into many ad sets.

Avoid setting up multiple audiences that overlap more than 20%. You can see which audiences are overlapping within a single campaign by using our Audience Overlap Tool.

Avoid editing your ad multiple times in a short period. Every time you make a change, the algorithm will need to relearn how to deliver effectively to your audience.

As you get more sophisticated and find what works, you should iterate and layer new targeting to find even more efficient pockets.

Have any additional tips or tricks to share? Respond below in the comments!

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Content distribution across platforms like Facebook and Twitter has become an absolute necessity for publishers. Instead of focusing on driving clicks to their own websites, publishers are now vying for their audience’s attention on native platforms where the competition is stiff.

Jason Abbruzzese, Business & Media Reporter at Mashable, says it best: “Social is now flooded with content, and the platforms are no longer content to just be traffic hoses. Social will still be a huge part of distribution, but it’s far more competitive and cut-throat than it has been.” (Pulled from this great selection of social wisdom from NewsWhip)

There are hundreds of articles and blog posts published each week about how to create social content that engages and stands out from the crowd. But what are the key factors that make content truly “social-first?”

Here’s a list of what you should keep in mind when creating content for social platforms:

Video, video, and more video:
Audiences are hungry for video and becoming accustomed to seeing it in their feeds, particularly with the introduction of auto-play. Video posts average 62% more engagement than photos (source). 75% of Facebook video views occur on mobile devices (source), so video content needs to work on small screens. Test length, subject matter, captions, branding and other variables to find the sweet spot for your audience.

Leverage Facebook Instant Articles:While Facebook made a big to-do about Instant Articles being about a better experience for users, and not about taking power from publishers, the fact is it does indeed provide a better experience. No one likes scrolling down his or her feed, clicking on a post only to wait while it loads—if at all. Publishers say it’s getting easier to make money from Instant Articles, so why not give it a try? It’s now open to all publishers.

Social-first is mobile-first:Chances are your Facebook and Twitter audience is viewing your content on mobile, so focus on content that can be digested easily and on-the-go. Incorporate snack-able, eye-catching content such as video clips, GIFs, and infographics. Naturally, users will gravitate towards native content published in their feeds, so ask yourself which is more important–clicks or eyeballs? The right balance might be a combination of both.

Keep experimenting:It’s a phrase said and heard too frequently, but the only way to know what will work for you is to give it a try, while remaining true to your brand. There’s simply no one-sized-fits-all guidebook to producing engaging content. Some brands have shared their best practices, so articles like this one from Buffer Social are a good place to start.

Capitalize on trending topics:
Explore social listening tools to learn what people are talking about and when relevant topics, or your brand, are mentioned. Publishing platforms like Social Flow will even optimize your posts and Tweets to ensure they go out at the best time for your audience: when they are active and when the topic is trending.

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Since Instagram rolled out self-serve ads last year, marketers have been flocking to engage potential customers on the photo-sharing app. It’s no surprise, given the success of its parent company, Facebook.

Instagram ads became successful so quickly because it’s easy for advertisers to get up and running. Advertisers can set up Instagram campaigns from Facebook’s ad interface, and the same targeting options and ad formats are available. Most advertisers are already familiar with and comfortable with Facebook Ads, and since Instagram is an extension rather than an entirely new ad product, advertisers are more eager to give it a try.

Another important success factor is the ad format. Instagram is a full-screen mobile experience, and the ads follow suit. Rather than getting stuck in a sidebar or in a tiny mobile banner, brands get enough real estate to capture attention and tell a story. Instagram is a mobile product, and its ad experience lends itself well to mobile devices, unlike some other sites and apps that try to squeeze entire desktop web experiences (and ads) into a tiny screen.

Instagram has been quick to give advertisers what they want, particularly with mobile video ad opportunities. Most recently, Instagram rolled out 60-second video ads. The previous max was 15 seconds, which is pretty limiting, and advertisers were keen for more time in front of viewers.

However, there are still some issues preventing Instagram from becoming pure gold for advertisers. Because Instagram is traditionally a non-click environment, the platform has been cautious about rolling out links beyond the call-to-action buttons in its ads. That’s why you see so many brands and promoters referring to the links in their profile – users still can’t post clickable links along with their images. The only way to drive Instagram users to a website is through click-to-web ads, which are far more expensive than Facebook or Twitter. But even though Instagram is only pay-to-play, advertisers seem to be willing to pay up.

Instagram is in growth mode and has captured advertisers’ attention. It will be interesting to see what they roll out to keep advertisers happy in 2016.